Commentary - Genesis 6:5-8

Bird's-eye view

This brief passage is one of the most sobering and significant in all of Scripture. It provides God's own assessment of the human condition apart from His grace, and it serves as the legal basis for the most profound act of judgment in world history prior to the cross: the global flood. Here we see the utter ruin of humanity, the holy sorrow of God, the declaration of a just and total judgment, and the first explicit mention of grace in the Bible. This is not simply a historical record of a long-ago society's wickedness; it is a definitive statement on the nature of fallen man. The diagnosis is total depravity. The emotional reaction from Heaven is holy grief. The sentence is de-creation. And the only hope, the only reason the story does not end here, is a four-word sentence that introduces the central theme of the entire Bible: "But Noah found favor." This passage sets the stage for the rest of redemptive history, which is a story of God's judgment on sin and His gracious salvation of sinners through a chosen vessel of grace.

In these four verses, the moral logic of the universe is laid bare. God sees, God feels, God speaks, and God acts. He is not a distant, dispassionate deity. He is an engaged and personal Lord whose heart is grieved by the rebellion of His image-bearers. The judgment He decrees is not arbitrary but is the necessary response of a holy God to pervasive, unrepentant evil. And the salvation of Noah is not based on Noah's intrinsic merit but on the favor, the grace, that God sovereignly bestows. This is the pattern of the gospel in miniature: the radical corruption of man, the holy justice of God, and the unmerited grace that provides a way of escape.

Outline

Context In Genesis

Genesis 6:5-8 is the pivot point between the story of creation's fall and creation's re-start. The early chapters of Genesis have traced a rapid and tragic downward spiral. After the initial fall in Genesis 3, we see the first murder in Genesis 4, the boastful polygamy and vengeance of Lamech, and then the perverse union of the "sons of God" and "daughters of men" in Genesis 6:1-4. This final act of rebellion, a grotesque attempt by man to secure immortality on his own terms, seems to be the breaking point. The text here provides God's summary evaluation of this entire period. It is the divine commentary on why the world created "very good" had become so corrupt that it required a cataclysmic cleansing. This passage therefore provides the direct justification for the flood narrative that immediately follows (Gen 6:9-9:17). It also sets a crucial precedent: God deals with sin through judgment, but He always preserves a remnant by grace, establishing a covenant with them. This pattern of judgment and covenant grace, established here with Noah, will be repeated throughout the story of Israel and will find its ultimate expression in the work of Christ.

Key Issues

The Fountainhead of Sin

Before we can make any sense of the Bible's story of salvation, we must first come to grips with the Bible's doctrine of sin. And there is perhaps no more potent and compressed diagnosis of the problem than what we find in Genesis 6:5. This is not a description of a few bad actors, or a society that has merely lost its way. This is a description of the human heart in its natural, fallen condition. The problem is not external, it is internal. The problem is not partial, it is total. The problem is not occasional, it is constant. Modern man believes he is basically good, and that his problems are rooted in his environment, his education, or his economic status. The Bible says that man's basic problem is man himself. He is not a sick patient who needs a little medicine; he is a corpse that needs a resurrection. Until we reckon with the radical nature of the disease as described here, we will never appreciate the radical nature of the cure offered in the gospel.

Verse by Verse Commentary

5 Then Yahweh saw that the evil of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

This is God's own verdict, and it is devastatingly thorough. First, God saw. He is not an absentee landlord; He is an attentive judge. He saw that man's evil was great on the earth. This was not a localized problem; it was pandemic. The corruption had saturated the world. But then the Holy Spirit takes us from the external manifestation of evil to its internal source. The problem is in the intent of the thoughts of his heart. The Hebrew word for intent, yetzer, refers to the imagination, the form, the very shaping of thought at its most basic level. God's diagnosis is that the fountainhead of all human action, the heart, is corrupt. And the scope of this corruption is described with three all-encompassing words: every... only... continually. Every inclination, without exception. Only evil, without any mixture of true righteousness. Continually, without a moment's rest. This is the biblical doctrine of total depravity. It does not mean that every man is as wicked as he could possibly be, but rather that sin has corrupted every part of his being, his mind, his will, his affections, so that he is utterly unable to please God or to save himself.

6 And Yahweh regretted that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.

Here we are confronted with language that is startling in its emotional force. How can the unchanging God (Mal. 3:6) "regret" something? This is what theologians call an anthropopathism, where God describes His disposition to us in human, emotional terms that we can understand. It does not mean God was surprised by the outcome or that He made a mistake. God is sovereign and ordains all things. Rather, this language reveals the true nature of sin from God's perspective. Sin is not just the breaking of an abstract rule; it is a personal affront that brings grief to the heart of the Creator. God's decision to judge the world was not a cold, mechanical calculation. It was a decision born of holy sorrow. The same heart that is grieved by sin here is the same heart that would later be physically pierced on the cross. This verse shows us that God's wrath is not a petty, vindictive anger, but the settled, grief-stricken opposition of a holy being to that which seeks to destroy His good creation.

7 And Yahweh said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I regret that I have made them.”

The divine sorrow of verse 6 now gives way to the divine sentence of verse 7. God's grief is not a passive sentimentality; it is a holy grief that must act. The sentence is to blot out man. The word is sometimes used for wiping a dish clean. This is a de-creation. Because man, the pinnacle of creation, had become so corrupt, the judgment extends to the whole created order over which he was given dominion. Man's sin dragged the world down with him. The judgment is comprehensive, from man down to the birds. This shows the tight connection between humanity and the rest of the cosmos. As man goes, so goes the creation. This principle is seen in the curse on the ground in Genesis 3, and it is seen here in the un-creation of the flood. God repeats His "regret," tying the judicial sentence directly to His holy sorrow over man's sin. This is the just and necessary response of a righteous King to high treason in His kingdom.

8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of Yahweh.

After the unrelenting darkness of the previous three verses, this short sentence shines like a supernova. The story of humanity, which should have ended in verse 7, continues for one reason alone: grace. The word for favor here is the Hebrew word chen, which is the Old Testament equivalent of the New Testament word charis, or grace. This is its first appearance in the Bible. Noah did not earn this favor, he found it. It was bestowed upon him. While the subsequent verses will describe Noah as a righteous man (Gen 6:9), we must read that righteousness as the result of this grace, not the cause of it. God's grace always precedes man's righteous response. The entire world was guilty and deserving of judgment, Noah included. But God, in His sovereign good pleasure, set His favor upon one man and his family. From this one man, God would preserve the human race and the seed of the woman promised in Genesis 3:15. All of salvation history, culminating in the ark of Christ, rests upon this foundational principle introduced here: God saves sinners not because they are deserving, but because He is gracious.

Application

This passage forces us to confront two realities that our modern world desperately wants to ignore: the depth of our sin and the necessity of God's grace. We live in a culture that tells us to look within ourselves for the answers, to trust our hearts, and to believe in our own inherent goodness. Genesis 6:5 holds up a mirror to that heart and shows us what God sees: a fountain of corruption. The first step in becoming a Christian is to agree with God's diagnosis of you. You must stop making excuses and admit that you are not just a flawed person who makes mistakes, but a sinner who is spiritually dead and deserving of judgment.

But once we have stared into that abyss, the second reality comes into view. "But Noah found favor." Just as God provided an ark for Noah, a vessel of grace to carry him safely through the waters of judgment, so He has provided an Ark for us. The Lord Jesus Christ is our Ark. The flood of God's wrath against sin was poured out not on us, but on Him at the cross. By faith, we are brought into Him, and in Him we pass through the judgment and are brought out into a new creation. The application, then, is simple. Stop trying to patch up your own leaky raft. Acknowledge the coming flood of God's judgment, abandon all trust in your own righteousness, and flee to the only Ark of safety that God has provided, the Lord Jesus. It is only by finding grace in His eyes that you will be saved.